A NEW book reveals how the Sixties singer’s career was complicated by the need to keep her sexuality a secret.

She was a well-spoken middle-class girl from the Home Counties but she sang like a soul momma from the Deep South. Britain had never produced a singer quite like Dusty Springfield and, for that matter, neither had America – at least not one with white skin.

Dusty first found fame in the early 1960s with The Springfields, a pop-folk trio consisting of her older brother Tom and their friend Tim Feild, but it was as a solo artist that she cracked America to become the world’s best-selling female vocalist. The album she recorded there in 1968, Dusty In Memphis, is regularly included in “best ever” lists. With her elegant gowns and clipped accent, her image was all refinement and sophistication.

But a definitive biography of the singer, based on new material and frank interviews with those closest to her, reveals that behind the bleached bouffant hairdos (which were mostly wigs anyway) and good-girl manners lurked a ferocious temper and a taste for bizarre humour that bordered on sadistic.

Dusty’s idea of a joke was tripping someone up as they went on stage or dropping crockery in the wings to sabotage their performance. Her many backstage tantrums usually ended up with her throwing something, be it a vase or shoes, and food fights were a favourite way to relieve stress.

Like many stars, she slid into heavy drinking and drug dependency but she was also addicted to emotional turbulence. Her constant fights with live-in girlfriends often involved serious violence and as a series of bad decisions and professional own goals saw her career falter, she attempted suicide and resorted to self-harm.

Throwing food as a way of venting her anger and inflicting pain on herself in a bid to feel alive were habits picked up from childhood. Home for Mary O’Brien, as Dusty was born in April 1939, was a far from happy place.

In her later years Dusty with the Pet Shop Boys [Getty Images]

Her Irish mother Kay had failed in her ambition to become an actress while her father Gerard (known as OB) was a tax consultant and frustrated concert pianist. Dusty described him as “a very bitter man with a foul temper. By the time I was at school my mother thought he was repulsive”.

This deeply incompatible couple would barely talk to one another. A wrong remark at mealtimes could make Kay send a bowl of potatoes flying, triggering a food fight.

Neither parent showed much interest in or affection towards their daughter, who was known as Pudge. Dusty recalled clinging to the hot water pipes in her bedroom “to prove I really existed”.

What the O’Briens did have was a love of music and it was OB who introduced Mary to early jazz and blues.

When she formed a schoolgirl band at her convent in West London, their rendition of St Louis Blues was banned by the nuns for being too raunchy.

The Springfields became the top British vocal group of the pre-Beatles era. Then Dusty went solo in 1963, scoring immediate success with I Only Want To Be With You.

She had further chart hits with You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me, the Burt Bacharach songs Wishin’ And Hopin’ and I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself, and Son Of A Preacher Man. Despite her fame she was neurotically insecure.

She told her hairdresser John Adams she thought she looked like Burt Lancaster and she had her first nose job when she was in her mid-20s. She was also convinced that her career would be ruined if her fans knew she was a lesbian.

“She was terrified if it came out it would ruin her career and her fans would leave, so she refused to talk about it,” her backing singer Jean Westwood told biographer Karen Bartlett. Her relationships did not make her happy.

In 1966 she fell in love with singer Norma Tanega, who moved into her mews house in Knightsbridge, but domestic life was stormy. Adams grew used to phone calls in the middle of the night in which both women urged him to come over because the other was trying to kill her.

When she moved to America, her relationship with girlfriend Sue Cameron ended when Dusty chased her with a knife. “In my heart I think she was playing a sick game that was almost out of her control,” Cameron says.

“I ran out of there to save myself.” After going through an unofficial marriage ceremony with Teda Bracci, an American actress she met through Alcoholics Anonymous, she had a drink and valium-fuelled row in which she slashed her wrists with a broken cup which she then used to cut her lover’s leg.

Bracci hit her around the head with a boot. Dusty was admitted to hospital with her front teeth missing and had cheap plastic surgery on her mouth that meant her face always looked partially frozen.

Hell-raising like the male rock rock stars of her era, she pitched a TV into the pool from her 14th floor hotel room in Memphis and shocked visitors by throwing food and furniture into the pool at her house in LA’s Laurel Canyon.

In the chaos, she made terrible professional decisions. She drove producers and musicians crazy with her perfectionism, recording one line at a time to ensure every detail was exactly right.

She drove producers and musicians crazy with her perfectionism, recording one line at a time to ensure every detail was exactly right

Sometimes she just didn’t turn up. When her career was in the doldrums, Elton John wrote the duet Don’t Go Breaking My Heart for her but she was too unreliable to record it and so he asked Kiki Dee to sing it and it stayed at the top of the charts for six weeks.

She also turned down the song Killing Me Softly before Roberta Flack recorded it and she did the same with Nobody Does It Better, the theme for the 007 film The Spy Who Loved Me in 1977.

“The Bond people waited forever for her to get it together to record it,” says Cameron.

“They couldn’t wait any longer and they gave it to Carly Simon. I went through the roof. I was so mad at her for drinking and causing that.”

But in the late 1980s Dusty returned to Britain and rebuilt her career with two hits written and produced by the Pet Shop Boys as well as two more albums. However, she stopped work when the breast cancer she thought she had beaten returned. “I’m going to die and I’ve never done it before. I don’t know how to do it,” she told Cameron, who provided long-distance support.

Dusty died on March 2, 1999, six weeks short of her 60th birthday. She just missed seeing her induction into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall Of Fame but she did live long enough to receive her OBE, which was delivered to her at London’s Royal Marsden Hospital.

At first she had been unsure about whether to accept it, saying: “Isn’t that the one they give to cleaners?”

But it cemented her status as a national icon and she was particularly pleased when it arrived from Buckingham Palace wrapped in a Fortnum & Mason carrier bag.

To order Dusty An Intimate Portrait Of A Musical Legend by Karen Bartlett (Robson, £20) call the Express Bookshop on 01872 562310, send a cheque or postal order payable to The Express Bookshop, to Express Bookshop, PO Box 200, Falmouth, Cornwall TR11 4WJ or go to expressbookshop.com. UK delivery is free.